Welcome to F.A.T. Lab

The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of technologies and media. Release early, often and with rap music. This is Notorious R&D.

Rollin’ with the slick new Firefox 3 beta yet? Sadly when I fired it up it sez to me “some of your extensions are incompatible with this version of Firefox”. It’s full of shit. Here’s how to get around it:

James Snyder did a nice little write up and video piece about the G.R.L. for time.com. I wanted to throw him some shine because besides doing his research he managed to link to examples of our work (outside of time.com) 10 times in the course of one article! It drives me crazy when I read online news articles about things which exist on the internet but don’t get linked up because they are not on the organizations server (NYT for example is apparently unaware of how to use the href tag). The href is a wonderful thing. And since Theo continually gets left out of the story I thought I’d atone with some href love:

At the first glance TINA seems to be the best “attention-h0″ ever, famous for her trashy and brave “user generated content”. Her youtube videos are absolutley authentic, the internet loves her, and she has a big fanbase. But why would a person expose itself in such a excessive way? Just for being internet famous?

Her recent flyer promoting “Tina’s Essay Contest” looks so perfectly trashy and 90s style, that it smells like the work of a professional. Color, typography, well-cropped backgrounds – it’s hard to do it better. Compare the flyer of TINA with Bennet4$senate’s (F@ Lab artist)

Is this the work of professional amateurs? For me, it is “internet famo art”, following even bigger footsteps than Lonelygirl15:

TINA also stands for “There Is No Alternative“, a term of the famous sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Wikipedia quotation: Bourdieu claims that how one chooses to present one’s social space to the world, one’s aesthetic dispositions, depicts one’s status and distances oneself from lower groups. DAMN!

As TINA knows how-to present her social space to the world really well, we should look forward to her further career. See also: http://internetfamo.us/class/